so that she did not believe it at all. But they did, and that was what mattered. "Pray to St. Anthony the Abbot," she would add. "And put on the ointment." Or whatever was right for the problem.
Gradually she let slip from her mind the part Constantine had played in the riots. He loved the people, and he was tireless in ministering to them. He had a purity of thought and a strength of faith that eased away the fear that crippled so many.
Always he comforted them. "God will never abandon you, but you must have faith. Be loyal to the Church. Do the best you can, always."
She too felt the need for someone who knew more than she did and whose certainty healed her own gnawing doubts. How could she deny it to anyone else?
At the end of one particularly long day, tired and hungry, she was glad to accept the invitation to return to his home and eat with him.
The meal was simple, bread and oil, fish, and a little wine, but with the poverty she had seen in the last weeks, abundance would have been close to obscene.
She sat opposite Constantine at the table in the quiet summer evening. It was late and the torches were all that lit the night, throwing warm, yellow radiance onto the walls, catching the flash of a gold icon. The fish was finished and the plates removed, only bread, oil, and wine were left, along with an elegant ceramic bowl of figs.
She looked across at him. The lines in his smooth face were deep with tiredness, his shoulders slumped under the weight of other people's pain.
He became aware of her glance and looked up, smiling. "Something troubles you, Anastasius?" he asked.
She ached to tell him and be rid of the burden of guilt that sometimes weighed so heavily that she was not sure she could ever stand upright beneath it. And of course she could say nothing.
He was watching her now, his eyes searching.
"Yes, I am troubled," she said at last, crumbling bread absentmindedly in her fingers. "But then I imagine many people are. I was called to treat the emperor a short time ago..."
He looked up, startled, and then a darkness came into his face, but he did not interrupt her.
"I could not help becoming more aware of some of his views," she continued. "Of course, I didn't discuss such things with him. I think he is committed to union with Rome, whatever the cost, because he believes there will be another invasion if we remain separate." She gazed at Constantine steadily. "You know better than he does the poverty we have. How much worse will it be if there is another crusade, and it comes through here again?"
His heavy hand on the table clenched until it formed a fist, knuckles white. "Look about you!" he said urgently. "What is beautiful, precious, and honest in our lives? What keeps us from the sins of greed and cruelty, of the violence that despoils what is good? Tell me, Anastasius, what is it?"
"Our knowledge of God," she said immediately. "Our need for the light we have seen, and can never wholly forget. We have to believe that it exists and that if life is lived well, in the end we can become part of it."
His body eased, and he let out his breath slowly. "Exactly." A smile ironed the weariness from his face. "Faith. I tried to tell the emperor that, only two days ago. I said to him that the people of Byzantium will not accept any pollution of who we are, and what we have believed since the first days of Christianity. Accepting Rome tells God that we will sacrifice our beliefs when it is expedient to us."
He saw the understanding in her face, and perhaps something of the peace that he had brought her. "The emperor agreed with me, of course," he went on. "He said that Charles of Anjou is planning another crusade even now, and that we have no defense. We will be slaughtered, our city burned, and those of our people who survive will be exiled, perhaps this time forever."
She stared into his face, his eyes. "God can save us, if it is His will," she said softly.
"God has always saved His people. But only when we are faithful." He leaned across the table toward her. "We cannot put our trust in the arm of flesh, deny our loyalties, and then when we are losing, turn